Our Story
We’re helping businesses boost their performance on the beach. But the BizTreat story, ironically, begins in a city. More precisely, the city of London, a place separated from the beach by a five-hour drive. It was here that a soon-to-be surfing enthusiast resolved to follow her dreams and travelled to a small island in the Philippines. Inspired by her experiences living in a tropical paradise, Veronika re-entered the business world, and she brought with her a whole new way of looking at professional learning and development.
Veronika loved her job. However, leading a successful career in a fast-paced city comes with a price. Burning out from busy working lives led the product manager to take time out. Upon arriving in the surfing capital of the Philippines, Siargao, initially for a holiday, she was instantly sucked in. It was decided – the island became her home.
In Siargao, the former city professional felt immediately motivated and more productive thanks to daily sunrise surf and yoga sessions. But it wasn’t only the new lifestyle that offered a different, more mindful way to think about the work. Having previously led teams to a more empowered way of working, Veronika noticed that the same capabilities like collaboration, agility, creativity and prototyping, which became decisive business success factors, were present in the Islanders’ approach to solving everyday challenges. For Siargaonons it was the isolated, resource-poor and nature reliant environment that had set the necessity of coming up with new kinds of survival skills. For businesses worldwide, it was the technology revolution and the globalisation that didn’t give them the other choice but to embrace the digital transformation from within companies. Siargao has become an inspiration for a new way of developing a business culture of the future.
Veronika got excited about the opportunity and began with user research followed by product design, building relationships with vendors and collaborators and putting together the team. She built BizTreat from scratch in a mere four months. As a massive fan of validating ideas in the real world, she ran BizTreat Beta aimed at founders and independent business executives in April 2017, funded from her own pocket. That turned out to be a success and a massive learning experience which helped BizTreat to pivot. After this BizTreat established itself as an experiential learning company for teams. Veronika’s passion for and trust in what BizTreat has to offer immediately attracted high profile partners and first clients.
The future of business is exciting, but most importantly, it is already here. The BizTreat team is on a mission to help company teams become as inventive and as stoked as Siargao’s islanders.
“You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.” Jon Kabat-Zinn